Hey you!

Want to know how to lose weight, gain muscle, and feel great?

Want to go to the beach and be confident in that little bikini you've been eyeing at the mall?

Want to learn how to look smokin' hot for that guy or girl you've been crushing on for the past few months?

Want to know how the celebrities get that awesome 6 pack or that curvy but slim figure that makes them look killer in that dress you saw on TV or in that magazine?

Well, wait no longer! Because I'll let you in on a little secret to their success...

It's something everyone wants to know...

Only thing is, they already know it.

It's called diet and exercise.

Are you disappointed? Well, you shouldn't be.

There are several "tricks" to losing weight and toning your body, but the ones that work the best in the long run involve burning calories through exercise and eating nutritious healthy food, both in amounts that complement each other.

Countless weight loss products have appeared on the market. As if it's easy to burn enough calories to lose weight. Whole infomercials, magazine ads, TV commercials, etc. all dedicated to this one cause, telling you that you can hold a Shake Weight and let it work its magic to give you the tone and definition in your muscles that you've been waiting for as you sip your Corona on the couch in front of your TV.

But exercising is so hard! And you get all sweaty!

Yeah, it's hard, and yeah you get sweaty. But you can see the results through all that sweat as it drips off your forehead and onto the floor. These little drops of you that you no longer have. Diet pills and diet shakes replace real food that is jam packed full of nutrients IF you eat the right kinds in the right proportions. Sure, the pills may help your metabolism, but it will never rev up your metabolism like constant cardio workouts can.

The fact is, people KNOW what it takes to lose weight. And if not, there are plenty of online resources with the right information. Childhood obesity is a continuously growing problem in the US and yet we're constantly looking for a way around the hard work, allowing companies to use that search for the golden weight to their advantage. Americans want things to be easy, they want losing weight to be easy. Because everything else in life is hard.

We get so excited at the prospect of losing weight with a revolutionary new device that does all the hard work for us that we lose sight of what it really takes to shed the pounds. We expect results without wanting the grueling process. Advertising reinforces the notion that results can be obtained easily.

But what if we changed that?

What if we got everyone to be excited for the MOST REVOLUTIONARY method of losing weight? The tried-and-true method. What if we made exercising seem like a fun thing to enjoy and made the huffing and puffing and all the sweat from a good run the immediate reward to yourself?

In a way, we have started that change in advertising. We look up to celebrities and admire how they look. When a fit, well-known celeb is promoting a workout routine, we pay more attention to the machine they're using.

So where's the problem? The celebrities demo-ing the weight machines on the infomercials aren't sweating. I don't know about you but I'm certainly not smiling and keeping a perfect face when I'm getting my workout on at the gym. What the ads aren't showing you is that those celebs have strict diets and sweat it out at the gym for hours to achieve those rock hard bodies. Their personal trainer did not take a chisel and give them abs.

So what should advertising do? For starters, ads should get people excited about exercise. Use all the persuasion tricks in the book to get people moving. And be real about it, too. Show people on TV grunting and sweating while working out. Show us that it's hard for EVERYONE to go from a sedentary to active lifestyle and to maintain that fitness. Show us the process that it takes to obtain results. If we want to start believing that we can look just as good in that form-fitting, back-baring Chanel dress or in any other outfit too, then help us believe that those celebrities are, in fact, real people who do have to squeeze a good workout in during their own hectic lives. Help people find what they might be interested in or even good at, by promoting all sorts of ways to keep healthy.

If Coke can get people to drink a coke by flashing that message enough times on the screen during a commercial break, then maybe a different message can get people to go for a jog, even if it's jogging in place during commercials.

We're going to have to believe this:

instead of this:

if we're really going to get up off the couch.